UN PICCIONE SEDUTO SU UN RAMO RIFLETTE SULL'ESISTENZA EN DUVA SATT PÅ EN GREN OCH FUNDERADE PÅ TILLVARON

Roy Andersson

1h 41m  •  2014

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Review by Beatrice On 23-Jun-2023

39 long takes with static, detailed, and unsettling images tell small, grand everyday stories that are soberly hyperbolic.

From the trilogy "being a human being" to the three hilarious encounters with death:

- a man dies opening a bottle while his wife hums

- an elderly lady on her hospital bed clings to her purse filled with money and jewels;

- a man dies in a cafeteria with his paid and ready meal that people try not to waste...

In this art gallery of hypnotic characters, two witnesses of city life, sales representatives, sell entertainment items:

medium and long vampire teeth, the laughing bag that lifts the mood, and the uncle mask with a single tooth.

Lotte the Lame's tavern where she charges kisses from those who have no money; a rather bizarre King Charles XII, the flamenco teacher who flirts with a dancer while almost everyone talks on the phone and always responds with the same phrase: "I'm glad to hear that things are going well for you"...

But what is going well?

In a world powdered with white death where the brightest colors are beige, greenish, and yellowish; in a world where there is a crisis... birds are stuffed, monkeys are guinea pigs, and humans are treated like slaves... Only the mocking gaze of the pigeon on the branch reflects on the existence of beings already unconsciously dead and indifferent to their condition. It is a spectral reality represented under a dubious natural light, without surprises or jolts. It seems like a temporary truce of life tolerated in its insignificant pallor.

Are these beings authentic or inauthentic? There is a true and a false absurdity: one can escape the latter with authentic thought, but what about the former?

Only in the tension between man, world, and absurdity can one become an authentic witness of the absurd, living it tormentingly within oneself without any dialectic of hope.

Humor blends with the tragic in this sublime work of pure art, which seeks to represent the never-concluded synthesis of a banal and virtual existence that heads in all directions without going anywhere.

The poetics of the absurd, caught in a vice, clarified, defined, less challenged than tolerated; the testimony of the paradox, the comic triumph of defeat.

Conclusion? Beware of getting used to living before getting used to thinking: can one find true freedom in slavery?

In the cradle of the absurd, one is suspended between earth and sky like infant rulers vibrating between indignation and indifference.

A PERFECT WORK for a cinematic art exhibition.

23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice